00:00:35.000September 2003 announced October 2004.
00:00:40.000So, for people that don't know what we're talking about, is the supposed Hobbit people from the island of Flores, a very small, tiny, it's in the Homo genus, right?
00:00:53.000So, it's a relative of human beings.1.00
00:00:56.000That's what they, that's a little fella right there.
00:01:04.000Is that you were on that island quite a bit before that, and you were investigating the possibility of this existing a long time before that?
00:01:16.000I first began field research on Flores as an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist, in 1984.
00:01:25.000I was interested in the people and the culture and the languages generally, but quite early in my stay, in fact, in 1984, during my first visit, I heard about These small hominoid, human like creatures, which were known locally.
00:01:46.000Actually, at that time, I was working right in the central part of the island, a place called Nage.
00:01:51.000And the Nage people, according to the Nage people, there were a group of these, used to live close by in a cave high up on a nearby volcano.
00:02:03.000But they had become extinct about two, three hundred years ago.
00:02:08.000So, in that particular area, that particular part of Flores, they weren't supposed to be around anymore.
00:02:13.000But then, subsequent to that visit, I began to hear about similar creatures further to the east in a place called Leo.
00:02:27.000And those are the ones I write about in the book.
00:02:31.000Yeah, in the book you discuss two distinct, at least possible, different species.
00:02:37.000One of them being Homo floresiensis and the other one being this, the one from Leo?
00:02:48.000I mean, there's Homo floresiensis, which lived on the island of Flores for a long time and must have lived in places other than the single discovery site.
00:02:59.000And then there are the claims, the descriptions offered by Leo people about Creatures they say are still around, rare, but still present in their territory, in which some people claim to have seen and have given quite a vivid description of.
00:03:20.000And they seem very similar, if I may just expand a bit.
00:03:26.000There has been discovered, after a deliberate search by paleoanthropologists, if you'll appreciate that distinction, also in the central part of Flores, in fact, in a place where.
00:03:43.000Decades ago, there were discovered stigodons, kind of primitive elephant bones in large numbers.
00:03:51.000Numbers, it was assumed, and there was evidence that something had, if not killed these things, these stigodons had at least eaten them, eaten their carcasses.
00:04:06.000A very long, intensive study was done in what, the 2000s into the 20 teens, looking for.
00:04:23.000Some kind of human, some kind of hominid remains.
00:04:27.000And finally, after a concentrated effort, they found pieces of jaw, pieces, oh, right, teeth, that belonged to something far older than Floresiensis, going back about 700,000 years ago and contemporaneous with what were taken to be stone tools, which is what kind of set them in motion in the first place, which were even smaller than.
00:04:57.000And it is kind of presumed that these are possible ancestors of Floresiensis.
00:05:06.000Again, going back further hundreds of thousands of years, 700,000, 600,000, 700,000, something in that.
00:05:15.000Yeah, but there's also stone tool evidence or stones taken to be possible tools that takes us back even further to like a million years ago, maybe even.
00:06:43.000And it is a well known generalization, certainly in that part of the world, that you can't distinguish species on the basis of stone tool industries, as they're called.
00:06:57.000In other words, you need skeletal evidence in close association with anything that.
00:07:03.000Is a stone tool or might be to say what species probably made these things.
00:07:08.000So, yeah, none of these can we securely attribute to Homo pharisiensis.
00:07:15.000There have been some fascinating recent studies actually on stegodon bones close to the location of the discovery site.
00:07:52.000But then again, I mean, the recent interpretations and analyses have suggested that these stigodons, which may have been consumed by Floresiensis, were killed, not by Floresiensis, not hunted by Floresiensis, but instead were killed by.
00:08:14.000Komodo dragons, which is the world's largest lizard, growing up to 10 feet long and a formidable animal.
00:08:29.000Venom glands, terrifically sharp teeth, and a deadly tail.
00:08:36.000So they were probably scavenging or potentially scavenging what was left.
00:08:40.000And anything that could be taken for a cut, well, the bones that Have been studied.
00:08:46.000They show marks, but mostly from dragon's teeth, Komodo dragon teeth, or Komodo monitor teeth, to use another name.
00:09:01.000Those that don't look like Komodo dragon teeth marks have been interpreted as possible stone tool marks used by Floresiensis, but merely to scrape meat off the bones, not to kill the animal.
00:09:19.000But were there humans living on the island of Flores at the same time?
00:09:25.000If I'm not mistaken, well, when Floresiensis was discovered, the oldest date for Homo sapiens on the island was 11,000 years ago.
00:09:57.000Yeah, although, again, if I've got this right and if I'm up to date on this, I'm not sure that there's clear evidence from bones that any of the elephants were killed by Homo sapiens.
00:10:16.000Right, like spear marks, cut marks when you're butchering, that sort of is the big.
00:11:01.000Yeah, no, you're certainly correct there.
00:11:05.000Although one of the senior investigators, the original find, said memorably that just the discovery of something like Homo florusiensis at, you know, 12, 13,000 years ago, or even a bit older, was more surprising.
00:12:11.000I've written a bit about that as well, but the difference, I guess, well, a couple of differences with Florisiensis is that with Florisiensis, we have fossil evidence for something that could have survived until much more recently, whereas in Sumatra, the fossil evidence for Orang Pendic is not there.
00:12:40.000And also, of course, on Sumatra, you have all kinds of primates that could be, shall we say, mistaken or taken for a very small human.
00:14:26.000Trevor Burrus Not necessarily mythological, but it sounded like they could well have been identifying monkeys seen in.
00:14:37.000Trevor Burrus And another well, one reason for that was what they described.
00:14:42.000Another reason was that a lot of those less credible ones were in circumstances when you wouldn't expect a human to encounter anything like florizians.
00:14:55.000And likely close to the coast, where most people live and have lived for a long time, whereas, yeah, all indications are that the Laihoa, as they're called, the local hominoids, are.
00:15:14.000Much higher up in unsettled parts of the mountains.
00:15:19.000So that would indicate that there's a food supply for them up there.
00:15:33.000I mean, the dentition on the type specimen, the skull, the teeth, suggests a vegetarian, a herbivore, if you will.
00:15:50.000The best specimen, the type specimen as it's called, doesn't really show any definite canines.
00:15:59.000Molars are fine, in great shape, by the way, for the age.
00:16:07.000But, yeah, so I'm not saying they didn't have pronounced canines as do chimpanzees, for example, even though chimpanzees are also largely vegetarian.
00:16:21.000Aaron Ross Powell, largely, but they apparently prefer to eat monkeys.
00:16:51.000But if you were a creature that lived in this mountainous terrain, it's probably not a wide variety of mammals, right?
00:17:03.000And if they didn't really have weapons, if they had very small stone tools, there seems to be no indication they have anything they could throw.
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00:19:49.000But if you're a 10 foot long poisonous lizard, it's going to be hard to sustain that mass.
00:19:56.000Just on rats, unless they're overpopulated with rats.
00:20:00.000Well, I've got to say that once extinction dates for pygmy stigodon or any stigodon, well, I can't recall the current figures, but these are always changing, by the way.
00:20:14.000But as soon as you had humans on the island, you had pigs and dogs, and some of the pigs quite quickly, I think, became feral, which they wild.
00:20:31.000So, and yeah, and then, you know, deer at one point were introduced by humans.
00:20:37.000So, certainly deer and pigs, and not to mention domesticates like goats, even, you know, young buffalo and horses are prey to dragons at present.
00:20:50.000So, in a sense, it could be Homo sapiens that's kept that creature alive.
00:20:57.000So, they could have wiped out the pygmy elephants, and then we could have probably maybe come in.0.99
00:21:04.000At a very opportune time with a bunch of domesticated animals, pigs, dogs, and then they start eating those.0.98
00:21:11.000Trevor Burrus, I should say also the little ape man, the Leo, for example, describe, also reputed occasionally to steal chickens, very small piglets.
00:23:57.000So you need, well, from what I'm told, what I am told often, was told often by the Nage, for example, is that you need more than one person.
00:25:02.000The first story I heard in the Nage region that I've mentioned was a kind of local legend about how they were wiped out by the ancestors of the Nage.
00:25:16.000And it's a story that, whatever the basis, in fact, I've clearly been.0.99
00:25:26.000Yeah, you get narrative themes entering, including two escaping the extermination, and this is an old plot line, and moving to another territory where they, sister and brother, it's usually said, where they incestuously managed to maintain their species.
00:26:03.000They lived in a cave high on the mountain, but they were in the habit of coming down a bit lower downslope and joining in feasts and dancing of villagers.
00:26:17.000And they were given food by their reluctant hosts.
00:26:25.000But they did odd things, like, yeah, they would certainly eat the food, but then they'd start biting into the.
00:26:31.000The plates, which were made of well, made of traditionally made of sort of pumpkin skin, dried pumpkin skin.
00:26:41.000So, yeah, you can break them with your teeth.
00:26:43.000I don't know that a human could eat them or want to.
00:26:46.000So they were just confused as to where the food ended.
00:27:14.000Then, of course, eventually they wanted to go back to their cave to sleep it off.
00:27:18.000And what was the timeline for these supposed interactions?
00:27:20.000Well, as far as one could tell from local genealogies, family histories, that sort of thing, yeah, we'd be talking at least 200, 300 years ago.
00:27:30.000So this was like folklore or at least like legend that they would tell the stories of these people?
00:27:36.000And so this was the first story that you heard of these creatures?
00:27:40.000Yeah, there are other stories told soon thereafter.
00:27:45.000But this was the first one where you were explained that at least at one point in time there was supposedly a small, hairy, human like creature that lived on the island.
00:30:22.000Incredibly dense, mountainous, beautiful, but wildly, you know, uncharted not uncharted necessarily because we actually know where everything is, but people aren't going and making an audit of all the different animals that are there.
00:30:42.000So it is possible that something could, if you looked at it, you're like, well, maybe.
00:30:47.000Well, yeah, I mean, there have been studies by zoologists of.
00:30:50.000Certain parts of the local wildlife, local animal life.
00:30:55.000Been studies by zoologists of certain parts of the local wildlife, local animal life.
00:31:03.000But yeah, none explicitly in search of something like Floresiensis or the Leo ape men, as I call them.
00:31:14.000Trevor Burrus So when you first had someone explain to you an encounter, how far was that from the actual discovery of the bones?
00:31:25.000Because you had the The conversations with people that were telling you that they had encountered one prior to them discovering these bones.
00:32:16.000So, as we were saying, you had this encounter with someone who explained that they had seen one in the flesh, and then just a few months later they find these bones.
00:32:28.000That had to be incredibly exciting because you had.
00:32:31.000Especially in the early, when they were saying it might potentially only be 10,000 plus years old.
00:32:41.000And I mean, if I'd first heard about these things a year or two later, I probably wouldn't have written a book and I wouldn't have taken it much further.
00:32:56.000I would have thought, well, there is a possibility, however slim, that somebody's seen a reconstruction of Floresiensis in.
00:33:03.000You know, a newspaper or on television.
00:33:16.000One thing I subsequently discovered is that the name Laihoa is, in fact, recorded in a Leo language dictionary, Leo German, as a matter of fact, which was researched for that went on in the 1920s and not long after the establishment of.
00:33:37.000A Dutch colonial administration written by a German missionary.
00:33:50.000And some of the information, which came from sample sentences of the language, were consistent with what people generally were telling me about the Leo Ape Men.
00:34:06.000Another strong indication that the whole notion of these creatures hadn't come from the fossil discovery.
00:34:16.000Was there any encounters or descriptions from missionaries, from ancient missionaries that had visited?
00:34:25.000No, not that I've been able to discover.
00:34:29.000I've looked for that kind of thing, obviously, but no.
00:34:37.000The man I knew for quite a long time, a Dutchman, In the Nage region, a missionary, a Catholic missionary, who'd been there for ages.
00:34:47.000Catholic missionary who'd been there for ages.
00:34:52.000And he'd never heard of the Ubugogo, which are the Nage ape men, and which stories about these, like the ones I just described, are pretty widely known in the region near the village whose inhabitants were supposed to have wiped them out hundreds of years ago.
00:35:17.000But the missionary never never heard it.1.00
00:35:20.000I was surprised, and I'm sure he was being honest.
00:35:24.000Now, when you first got the initial report from someone that had encountered one of these in real life, did you then start looking for other stories from other people to get more confirmation?
00:35:40.000I did, but I not so much in that particular year.
00:35:53.000And yeah, because I had to return to Canada, I think it was in the June, and I had to return in the July or early August, something like that.
00:36:01.000So I didn't have a lot of time in that year.0.88
00:36:05.000But after hearing about Farisiences, of course, I did initiate a new project, which enabled me, gave me funds to go back.
00:36:18.000And yeah, I talk about a bunch of things, not just the the hominoids, but certainly to pay much more attention to Leo, the Leo region, and to these creatures than I'd done previously.
00:36:34.000And how many reports of encounters had you had?
00:37:41.000I mean, one thing I show in my analysis, and it's been four years now, so I think I got this right, is that the sightings are both the clearest, most detailed.
00:37:56.000In other words, most credible sighting reports seem more accurate, more in line with the standard image of ape men than others.
00:38:13.000And even, as I said, even among the sighting reports, there were some that I was inclined to dismiss as being mistaken monkeys or.0.74
00:38:41.000I mean, if you have that many, and also you have bones, and then also you have a history of these things, it's just what would be required to comb the forest to try to find these things.
00:38:57.000Have you ever thought about like what kind of resources would be required?
00:39:12.000Not so much forests, although forests included, but higher slopes of mountains, of which there are many, and certainly in Leo territory and neighboring districts as well.
00:39:27.000You'd need people who are young and fit.
00:39:31.000Trevor Burrus, you'd need different sorts of expertise.
00:39:36.000I mean, certainly people who could handle the terrain.
00:39:42.000Maybe also people who, well, primatologists, shall we say, people specializing in the study of apes and monkeys, that would be helpful.
00:39:58.000Zoologists working in that area as well.
00:40:05.000You mentioned, you know, camera traps, that would be a good idea.
00:40:08.000In fact, I'm working, I think you could say, at Present with a man in the Netherlands who is very keen on doing the sort of thing you've just described.
00:40:27.000He has visited one area in particular, and there's a story about that, but I won't backtrack just yet.
00:40:37.000He has visited one volcano and placed traps, taken lots of photos, and so on.
00:43:03.000But the evidence in this case, the coincidence that we were talking about, a minute ago between the discovery, the reconstruction of Floresiensis and what Leo people and others were describing to me.
00:43:23.000The match is so remarkable that unless there's been some huge, well-hidden conspiracy designed entirely to fool little old me, I just can't imagine it.
00:43:39.000Well, you know, coincidences do happen, including remarkable ones, so maybe that's it.
00:43:44.000But even so, I think, yeah, it's worth further exploration.
00:43:52.000I mean, back in 2005, when I began to look at the Laihua hominoids in earnest, I was already approaching 60 years.
00:44:04.000I've never been particularly athletic.
00:44:09.000And, you know, by the time I left, Left off this piece of research back in 2018.
00:44:27.000Yeah, I won't go into the particulars of my present physical condition, but I, you know, it's a bit of a challenge going anywhere these days, I must confess.
00:44:40.000So, yeah, no, the research is worthwhile.
00:44:43.000Not, you know, It's a guaranteeing success of any sort.
00:44:50.000Now, what about potential use of technology?
00:44:52.000Are they going to use drones or anything along those lines?
00:46:34.000Yeah, well, certainly the creatures are.
00:46:38.000But, you know, the fact is that different people, their knowledge of local wild animals is different from, you know, maybe their neighbors or people at another end of the island.
00:46:55.000There is, in Western Indonesia, in Sumatra, Possibly on parts of the Malay Peninsula close by as well.
00:47:07.000There is a kind of wild rabbit or hare, not the kind of place where you'd expect to find rabbits or hares, perhaps.
00:47:17.000But this animal was unknown to most of the local people.
00:47:26.000It was discovered by Western, Dutch, I think, naturalists and given a scientific name and all that kind of stuff.
00:47:33.000Local people didn't have a local name.
00:47:39.000And in fact, it's now known mostly, so far as people are aware of it, with the national Indonesian name, Kalinchi, which refers to rabbits that were imported by the Dutch as food a couple of centuries ago.
00:48:21.000But if I may, something that I was going to say with regard to my friend who plans to go back to Flores with an expanded search,
00:48:38.000he became very interested in this particular locality, particular mountain, in fact, because of Reports I received out of the blue about three years ago from two British visitors, hikers, outdoorsmen, taking a break on Flores and doing scuba diving and hiking, a bit of mountain climbing, this kind of thing.
00:49:08.000They, I have to think about the details of this because it was, yeah, like three years back, they finally found their name, my name.
00:49:19.000I should say, after doing, one of them in particular, found my name after doing an internet search concerning apes and monkeys on Flores Island.
00:49:33.000And they came across my name in connection with a creature, central Flores creature called Ubugogo.
00:49:41.000And one of them, yeah, he wrote to me, he contacted me first of all across LinkedIn.
00:49:50.000And asked me about monkeys on the island, and I told him.
00:49:57.000He described to me what he and his friend, both of them at the same time, had seen on the highest slopes of this particular mountain.1.00
00:50:09.000He said, I think, in his first communication, that it sounds like you're a Bugogo.0.99
00:50:15.000So naturally, I followed this up and had some more conversations.0.90
00:50:20.000by phone and email with these two young men and there's nothing they told me to kind of disabuse me of that possibility.
00:50:32.000Now I should stress that I can't go into all the details or the circumstances of our communications but all indications are that they'd never heard of my writings or never read my writings on, you know, Florey's Ape Men.
00:50:49.000So they just had an encounter and just saw it?
00:50:53.000Well, it's interesting because I managed to interview them subsequently separately, which was a good thing.
00:51:00.000And one of them, in fact, the main contact, described what he saw as something very much like a Leo ape man, you know, a little man, a little human, but, you know, monkey-like.
00:51:28.000But a very big one, an unusually big one.
00:51:34.000It's interesting because those two opinions, those two interpretations, very much align with the range of descriptions that I recorded from local people.
00:51:46.000Some descriptions had it more monkey like, others more human like.
00:51:50.000Of course, naturally, there were variations in the estimated size of what Trevor Burrus What's the highest of it?
00:51:56.000Trevor Burrus The highest comes from a secondhand report.
00:52:38.000And they met and, you know, over a drink, started to reminisce about their visit to Flores and how they'd like to go back.
00:52:47.000And one said to the other, well, you know, God, do you remember that huge monkey we saw?
00:52:56.000And, you know, went on to discuss that.
00:52:59.000And then one of them, he, yeah, he took some time to kind of follow this up by looking for.
00:53:08.000Information on the internet, and it is that way that he finally came across my name and contact details.
00:53:17.000So, is that one of the only Westerners, or at least groups of Westerners, that spotted these things?
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00:54:48.000There was a man, not Western but Asian, I won't give any more details of that because he didn't want me to mention this in the book, but he came across something in the dark, trekking back towards upslope, a village he was staying in.
00:55:08.000He got a bit lost actually and managed to find his way and he saw something which was described, certainly interpreted by local people as having been One of these ape men.
00:55:22.000That would go back to, I guess, yeah, the last century, 1990s maybe.
00:55:48.000He was working on the neighboring island called Sumbawa.
00:55:53.000Which is immediately east of Flores, another big island, lots of mountains, and so on.
00:56:00.000And he had a similar sighting back in the, similar experience, I should say, back in the 1980s and was very open about the whole thing and gave me detailed descriptions on more than one occasion.
00:56:20.000Now, that he did allow me to mention in.
00:56:24.000In the book, in fact, in more than one book.
00:56:27.000And did he describe the same type of creature, the same type of experience?
00:56:31.000A big monkey standing upright, no tail, about three feet or more tall.
00:56:37.000Yeah, there was more than one of them that he saw at the end of a kind of a grown over area, sort of a tunnel that had been created by vegetation.
00:56:57.000Actually, he wanted to find there was a site with certain stone monuments that he'd heard about, and villagers down below had sort of pointed him in the right direction.
00:57:12.000He followed the trail they'd indicated.
00:57:16.000And he was still in his 20s at this time.
00:57:26.000What was grown over, grown over to the extent that he had to go on all fours to continue climbing.
00:57:37.000And it was at the end of this tunnel where there was some light, of course, a sunny day, where he saw several of these creatures, mostly kind of silhouettes, given the lighting conditions.
00:57:52.000They made sounds which were unlike local monkeys.
00:58:03.000He wrote it up in his field notes, which he showed me.
00:58:09.000Much tidier than my field notes, I can tell you.
00:58:14.000And, you know, what he'd written at that time accorded with what he told me.
00:58:21.000So, again, you know, talk about Floresiensis.
00:58:23.000I mean, there's no reason that that species or something very much like it is not present or wasn't at one time present also on other islands around and about, you know.
00:58:40.000And this, so his depiction of it was before you had ever had your first.
00:58:54.000My first research in Indonesia was done in the 1970s as a doctoral student.
00:59:00.000And you had never heard any of these stories then?
00:59:03.000Well, I was working on the island of Sumba, which is not the same as Flores, a big island to the south, not to be confused with Sumbawa, but this is just Sumba.
00:59:12.000And there is a tradition of Well, something sounds more like the Sasquatch, actually, or the Bigfoot.
00:59:21.000Because, yeah, these are sort of, you know, half human, half ape, standing on two legs, but they're much bigger than, well, than us, certainly much bigger than local people.
00:59:36.000So they're talking about, you know, two to three meters in height.
00:59:41.000And I must say, the evidence for them is not as good as for.1.00
00:59:54.000Also, I might mention that I did my first degree in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University, my undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser in the late 60s and into the 70s.
01:00:08.000And this was a time when there was a lot of interest locally in British Columbia in Bigfoot.
01:00:17.000It was also at that time, yeah, late 60s.
01:00:21.000Very late 60s, that there was the film supposedly made in Northern California.
01:00:54.000But there's that film, and then of course there's the phenomenon as a whole.
01:01:00.000But anyway, from that kind of thing going on in the late 60s, early 70s, I became interested in, well, I was studying anthropology at the time, including prehistory and paleoanthropology, and a lot of talk about the possibility of this kind of thing.
01:01:20.000And yeah, so I was just studying human evolution and.
01:01:27.000And I became aware at that point that there were reports of things still alive that kind of looked like, you know, Homo erectus or some of these physically primitive forms of Homo, of humans.
01:01:43.000Well, it's an incredibly fascinating idea.
01:01:45.000And we know from what we know about the fossil record, the fossil record is so incomplete because it's so difficult to make a fossil.
01:01:56.000So When we find new things like the Denisovans, which is a very recent discovery, we go, oh, well, there's a totally different branch.
01:02:09.000So, we don't really know because it's so difficult to make a fossil.
01:02:16.000In fact, it's infinitesimally remote a possibility of a species, just a whole species, not just an individual animal being survived, being preserved, being fossilized.
01:03:52.000And when you find something that's 60,000 years old, like those bones that they found in the cave, the odds of those being the last ones that existed are very small.
01:04:22.000But no, and let's remember as well that the evidence suggests that what's called Homo florisiensis survived for at least 50,000 years, which is quite a stretch of time.
01:04:40.000Especially when we don't really know how they got there.
01:11:03.000So, all these various animals the elephants could swim, the dragons could swim, the rats could figure out a way to get there, birds obviously could fly.
01:11:10.000Yeah, bats, lots of bats, they can fly.
01:11:39.000I mean, there's like dogs, for example, there's some evidence that suggested that they haven't been there very long several hundred to a thousand years but it seems likely to me they've been there longer.
01:11:54.000Pigs, there is a book in which I've written about all this stuff, but I can't remember now.
01:12:02.000Anyway, yeah, you know, they're monkeys, porcupines.
01:12:06.000There are porcupines that were introduced from Western.
01:13:55.000But then there are uh not sure the present uh state of interpretation on this one, but in uh, in China as well, in a place called Red Deer Cave, there's evidence for uh, for um small uh hominoids uh living yeah same region as uh, as Homo Erectus uh, which was a much bigger there uh a bigger uh hominin um yeah.
01:14:24.000And then in Africa you've got uh um Again, St. Florisians is the discovery of a.
01:15:24.000So there's evidence that this particular type of creature existed all over the world, or at least.
01:15:31.000Parts of Asia and Africa with Naladi.0.96
01:15:36.000Of course, the whole of the New World, South and North America, there's no evidence there for any kind of human or primate except for South American monkeys.
01:15:50.000Do we know if South American monkeys were indigenous or were They were.0.86
01:15:58.000They came from the Old World originally.
01:16:43.000And what I also thought was really interesting was that when they first found these bones of Homo floresiensis, there was a lot of dismissing of it.
01:16:54.000And a lot of people thought that it was maybe humans that had some genetic abnormality.
01:17:49.000But anyway, he dismissed this as a new, Floresiensis as a new species.
01:17:58.000And he claimed that these, what they'd found, were one or more humans who were suffering from a brain condition called, well, there are a couple of different possibilities, but one's called microcephaly, I think.
01:18:16.000Yeah, so very small craniums, small brains.
01:18:19.000But this is an abnormality, and people in this condition, you know, they don't, as individuals, they don't survive.
01:18:27.000Adamantly rejected the notion that these were a different species.
01:18:31.000There was also the problem that these things are, yeah, the florizensis, of course, were small, small-bodied, which doesn't correlate with microcephaly, which just turns the head.
01:18:46.000And, yeah, no, I mean, I don't think there's many people who support this.
01:18:51.000There is another bone of contention, though, so to speak, and that has to do with the classification of Homo florisiensis as Homo or not.
01:19:05.000And there's, I mean, most paleoanthropologists still seem to support Homo, but there are some, including a guy called Chris Stringer at the National History Museum in London.
01:19:23.000Who I very much respect, mainly because what he says agrees with what I think.
01:19:29.000But no, he suggested that Phariseeanus is something much, much more primitive physically, and that it derives from something much older, a separate branch, going back to, I don't know, somewhere in the region of Australopithecine, so pre Homo.
01:19:52.000A lot of features of the fossils, not least of all the brain size, which is about that of a Chimpanzee, so pretty small, body size, and all the rest of it.
01:20:05.000The lack of evidence for, you know, much in the way of, or anything in the way of culture, all of these things suggest something that is a different kettle of fish altogether.
01:20:19.000And in fact, there was a senior member of the team.
01:20:26.000That discovered and analyzed and interpreted the Pharisiensis fossils, a guy called Peter Brown, an Australian anatomist, who proposed a different name for Homo Pharisiensis.
01:20:44.000He gave it a new genus, he put it into a new genus, which he named, he gave the suggested name Sundanthropus.
01:20:58.000Which would mean something like a man like being from the Sunda region, which refers to those islands.
01:21:13.000Yeah, I mean, that there were, you know, it was just arguable, this kind of stuff.
01:21:17.000But some of the reasons put forward were not particularly credible, I found.
01:21:22.000I mean, one suggestion was that, you know, this thing is so recent, bearing in mind that.
01:21:28.000One specimen was reckoned to be only 12,000, 13,000 years old at the time.
01:21:34.000But this species was too recent, so recent that it had to be Homo.
01:21:40.000This betrays a very kind of linear, progressive view of, not progressive in a political sense, but in a time sense, of human or hominin evolution.
01:21:59.000Really, I mean, it's ironic because, yeah, it was the discovery of Florisiensis that threw your monkey wrench into that whole picture of human evolution.
01:22:13.000I mean, it was evidence in favor of a view which had been around a little bit already by that time that you didn't have a single line of evolution, whereas something bigger and better, more developed and so on, replaced something more primitive in a single line of development.
01:22:37.000Rather, the suggestion was that the view now seems to be that the The human tree, family tree, as it were, is bushy.
01:22:52.000So, you know, something like a Jewish menorah, you know, the thing with the candles, you've got these things coming up side by side and, you know, terminating at the same point.
01:23:16.000Our culture, our history, religion as well suggest that.
01:23:20.000But no, so it's kind of ironic that you still find traces of this progressive linear view in certain statements made quite recently by paleoanthropologists.
01:23:34.000I think it's part of the problem with this.
01:23:38.000They adopt an idea, start saying that this is the fact, and then are very reluctant.
01:23:46.000To change their position, especially if they've been teaching it, if they're professors, if they've written books.
01:23:51.000Look, with the Clovis first thing, I forget the gentleman's name who found these stones that indicated that there were people in the Americas far earlier than that.
01:24:50.000So, you know, I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty, obviously, in this field of endeavor that you can't rule out anything as being correct, including the prevailing view, at least for the time being.
01:25:17.000I think on the whole, quite rightly, with regard to what I've written, I don't argue, I don't attempt to argue that Florisiansis or something deriving from Florisiansis is definitely still around.
01:25:42.000I'm not going to make a statement of conviction like that.
01:25:47.000All I'm trying to say, and my focus, of course, is on the people, the modern people of Forest Island, and their experiences and how they think, what they say, and all that kind of stuff.
01:26:00.000So, what I need to explain as an ethnologist, a cultural anthropologist, is the basis of some of their claims about things, about creatures, about beings.
01:26:53.000With what I am showing is that there is a possibility that when Leo people make these reports about their ape men, that their reports are accurately based on some actual experience that individuals, a few individuals at any rate, have had.
01:27:33.000But I mean, when you hear people talking about forest spirits, you start thinking about people in the jungle that have psychedelic rituals, like in the Amazon with ayahuasca.
01:27:42.000Yeah, well, for one thing, rarely are these things the forest spirits have seen.
01:30:32.000I mean, the plant materials are green, it's the fourth most uh commonly used addictive substance in the world after alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine.
01:32:17.000I mean, with some shamans, people called shamans in other parts of the world, you have them making deliberate efforts to dissociate, to alter their consciousness.
01:32:32.000Well, it can be through percussion, drumming, chanting.
01:33:09.000So that was just my point with this because you were talking about how there's things that they saw that clearly seemed to be mythological or just fiction.
01:33:26.000I must say, I mean, the Leo people certainly have these religious figures, if you want to call them that.
01:33:36.000And I tended to dismiss their accounts.
01:33:41.000Which were often a bit towards the fantastic ends of things.
01:33:45.000Did they have other fantastic accounts, not of primates, but of other things other than forest spirits that also existed that seemed to be something that was fiction?
01:35:54.000I mean, I later discovered that this fantastic well, I was pretty sure beforehand, but it later became clear that people put Aoi as one of those and it was a palm civet.
01:36:08.000So then you have to take into consideration what other things are they seeing that is either getting exaggerated or getting incorporated into the folklore.
01:36:16.000Like if they see just a particularly large monkey, and maybe at a distance and maybe through thick brush, and then they decide, because monkeys will occasionally be bipedal for brief periods of time.
01:36:33.000So it gets to the point where you go, okay, if you have, you know, 30 people that have these stories that seem credible, at least a few of those have to be BS.
01:36:48.000If you have enough of them and they're so similar, and then you have bones, and then you don't just have bones there, but you have bones in the Philippines, you have bones in China, and you start in Africa, you start going, hey, maybe this is a real thing.
01:39:06.000I would say the best way to study them would be through field research, a primatological field researcher, a la, what's her name, Jane Goodall.
01:40:09.000Yeah, that this would present a real philosophical problem, a real conundrum.
01:40:16.000Yeah, so Forrest Gallant was telling me about a contemporary account of a woman who was an anthropologist who's I just cannot remember where the village was, but this person had encountered something.
01:40:54.000Western Papau, so it was in New Guinea.
01:40:57.000He did an interview with her, and she said that she had seen these little people, and then she woke up in camp more than one time, and they were looming over her and around camp.
01:41:11.000She's a very sane academic, he's saying, not like a jungle person who believes in third world superstitions, he says.
01:41:20.000This woman, who is a very sane literary author, cutting edge scientist, and she swears.
01:41:26.000That she saw these little people and she told the exact story.
01:41:31.000And so he says he actually has a recorded Zoom call that he could send me of this encounter.
01:41:38.000But this is a woman who was just like completely stunned encountering these tiny little people in New Guinea.
01:43:08.000And I don't want to make clear that, to my mind, there's not as much difference as you would think between Flores Islanders and Westerners who report similar experiences.
01:43:23.000But you said New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, I think?
01:43:28.000There are, again, in the highlands of that very big island, there are.0.99
01:43:34.000What are or used to be called human pygmies, pygmoid populations, who, yeah, there have been reports of those people showing up in sort of odd places and walking through human settlements as well.0.69
01:44:16.000In fact, I had some difficulty preparing for this interview because I'm working on the proofs, the final proofs and the index, and I did pieces recently on Halloween.
01:44:46.000So, whether bodily hair shows up more than it might do otherwise, can't recall those details, but they are small and they are dark, like most New Guineans.0.90
01:44:59.000And yeah, well, to be classified as pygmoid, they have to be the average male height has to be less than 1.5 meters, which is like, you know, well, less than five feet.0.93
01:46:06.000Where else are these credible witness accounts of people experiencing?
01:46:14.000These kind of little tiny ape like creatures.0.99
01:46:20.000Yeah, well, my first inclination is to say, well, you know, Flores and I guess Sumbawa, a neighboring island, and Sumatra as well, the Orang Pendek.0.53
01:46:33.000But there are reports from North America by native North Americans.
01:46:52.000Nothing terribly detailed, but I know I did some research for another book years back on the Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest.
01:47:09.000And I think it's the Bella Coola Indians, the Bella Bella Indians in British Columbia, coastal British Columbia, had a category of the name of creatures which.
01:47:20.000sounded like small, somewhat hairy folk.
01:47:24.000The Lai Hoa, of course, in Flores, there are various reports of how much bodily hair they have.0.89
01:47:41.000And according to some, they're not terribly hairy, not like a gorilla or a bear.
01:47:53.000You know, if you just have the description hairy, then, you know, if you don't take that any further and, you know, investigate more, you don't know what that means.
01:48:05.000I mean, hairy can mean, well, like the lady in the picture up there.
01:48:10.000It can refer specifically to, mainly to the head hair.
01:51:36.000Before she died, I don't know if she changed her opinion or she was probably tired of talking about it because that might have been the only thing people wanted to talk about.
01:51:44.000No, I mean there's a number of other primatologists and people who study primates in the field who have also subscribed to, if not Bigfoot, then the Yeti, a guy called Vern Reynolds, who's at Oxford at one time, I think, and a guy called John Napier, who wrote a very interesting book called, I guess, Bigfoot,
01:53:27.000Well, however eccentric I might be, I'm pleased to report that I never had, as a cultural anthropologist, particularly studying other people's experiences, beliefs, values, all this kind of thing, I never had that problem from my colleagues.
01:53:44.000I may have been more ignored than I would have been otherwise, but I've never had to put up with what Meldrum did.
01:53:53.000Well, Meldrum was like a full believer.
01:53:56.000I asked him if he could chop one of your fingers off to find out the Bigfoot was real, would you do it?
01:54:02.000But the point is, it's like as a cultural anthropologist, it is absolutely, at least the mythology of these things, is absolutely a part of culture and a fascinating aspect of it because there's so many stories and they're so uniform.
01:54:19.000It's all like an eight foot plus, nine foot tall, enormous, hairy, ape like creature that seems to be very human in a lot of ways.
01:54:30.000It doesn't have the arm length and leg length of an ape.
01:54:33.000It seems to be built more like a large, hairy person.
01:54:37.000Well, I would agree with you, except for one particular.
01:54:40.000These details, well, talking about Flores, these details don't show up so much in what we call mythology or myths or even legends to make that distinction.
01:54:58.000The naturalistic descriptions come from, well, mostly from supposed.
01:56:11.000It would change the whole conversation.
01:56:13.000Then the conversation would be is this an extinct?
01:56:16.000An extinct, like imagine if they had found some Bigfoot jawbone in a cave somewhere that was an unknown primate that is 8,000 plus years old.
01:56:27.000Then you'd have to go, okay, now what are we talking about?
01:56:29.000Are we talking about something that's extinct or are we talking about a very small population of intelligent creatures that has thus far evaded being captured on film?
01:57:22.000Well, it's the first thing, one of the first things I discuss in the book is the different cultural contexts, circumstances of, on the one hand, people in Flores, ordinary villagers, reporting what they once saw, the culture, the
01:57:47.000circumstances, all that kind of stuff, on the one hand, and the culture, the. socioeconomic system in which people who claim to have observed Bigfoot live, different kinds of interests.
01:58:07.000I mean, nobody on Flores thinks they're going to become famous by telling me what they've seen, whatever it may have been.
01:58:16.000Whereas with Bigfoot in North America, then you can become rich and famous.
01:59:12.000Now, when you were doing this whole investigation of Bigfoot, did you find any evidence or anything, any stories, anything that you thought was compelling?
01:59:20.000Well, I mentioned the 1884 report that was actually published in one of the few.
01:59:27.000Newspapers in British Columbia at that time.
02:05:41.000And again, I've said so in print in an earlier book.
02:05:46.000It's interesting that 1884, I mean, that was the time when great apes, gorillas, and chimpanzees were becoming widely known to a Western public.
02:07:20.000Anybody seeing, I don't know, a very shaggy dog or maybe a small bear in British Columbia at that time might have made a mistake or, you know.
02:07:33.000That's a part of the problem that created it.
02:08:40.000She goes, it did not look like a bear.
02:08:42.000I think it was a Sasquatch, and I think they're real.
02:08:46.000The problem, also, with the Pacific Northwest and that particular area we're talking about, like Mount Rainier, is so dense that the trees, the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q tips.
02:12:34.000But the point I wanted to make was that.
02:12:36.000But before a guy called Schweinfurth, a German explorer, was able to document the actual existence of African pygmies around the middle of the 19th century, I think it was 1847, so exactly 100 years before I was born, he actually bought one, if you can believe that.0.82
02:13:03.000I mean, as horrible as that sounds, but some pygmies were kept as slaves by taller Africans.0.53
02:13:13.000But before that, Europeans thought that pygmies were a myth, that there was no such thing, that this was a product of Greek mythology, especially.
02:13:23.000Of course, it's from there that the name pygmy comes.
02:13:27.000So, yeah, comparable to our knowledge of, or anybody's knowledge of gorillas, for example.
02:13:38.000Although pygmies were discovered a bit before it's fascinating when you think of how little people knew about the natural world just a couple of hundred years ago.
02:14:36.000It's called The Wicked Witch, and then there's a subtitle, which is Origins of an Enduring Worldwide Belief, because one of my main aims is to show that.
02:14:49.000There are very few cultures anywhere that don't have a belief that corresponds very closely, even in the smallest particulars, to what we understand by witches in the West.
02:15:03.000And I would immediately point out that I don't believe in witches.
02:15:08.000Whatever I might think about Homo Phalorisiensis or present day descendants that might exist, no, witchcraft exists in accusations.
02:15:20.000Still accused, as a matter of fact, in many places, including in the West, other people of being able to, of being evil, of being able to uh and harm other people maliciously wantonly, through supernatural means.
02:15:34.000So that's uh but, but there's a lot of uh other things i've discovered about witches in in that journey um, which actually belong uh began a very long time ago when I I first started to teach uh anthropology, but I think it's something that would be of interest to your listeners.